Why only one pack this year? All of your past exclusives had 2 different deco packs. Was it a production capacity issue from Hasbro with the CW stuff coming or EE just scaling back with a soft economy to play it safe?

Just curious.

The nature of this set and the tooling used didn't really lend itself to a variant. (That and Battle Damage probably wouldn't have been too exciting for these figures.) There's also a good amount of new, character-specific tooling here. The Star Wars line in 2008-- well, after July-- will be anything BUT soft, as there's a lot of great stuff coming out for fans to buy in he mid- to high-end toy arena. Once you see what the exclusive is, if you like it, you'll probably immediately see why two different deco packs probably wouldn't have been too great for fans. I usually like to say "more is better" but in this case, what comes in the box will be a good selection.

If you look at the web site, we're doing a decent amount of exclusives this year-- Funko, Round 5, Diamond Select, Bif Bang Pow, Acme Archives, other stuff I'm not yet at liberty to announce, and so on. I think we're actually probably doing more exclusive products in 2008 than any previous year I've been at the company, it's just with a big range of stuff and not all Star Wars.

Got it. Thanks for the response. I look forward to it as I have purchased your exclusives every year and have always been happy with them. I already ordered two sets last week, when do we get the one teaser figure image before SDCC?

Hmmm, character-specific tooling and lack of battle damage. So droids are out, and likely no pilots either? Would all female characters make sense? Battle damage wouldn't work with female characters. Going by the teaser image, you could probably eliminate the troopers and maybe pilot as contenders then.

Got it. Thanks for the response. I look forward to it as I have purchased your exclusives every year and have always been happy with them. I already ordered two sets last week, when do we get the one teaser figure image before SDCC?

The teaser image is in the shadows-- we just don't tell you which one it is. Any guesses at this point are kinda on your own, unfortunately.

Hmmm, character-specific tooling and lack of battle damage. So droids are out, and likely no pilots either? Would all female characters make sense? Battle damage wouldn't work with female characters. Going by the teaser image, you could probably eliminate the troopers and maybe pilot as contenders then.

Anything can be battle-damaged. A figure's armor can be redecorated quite easily, soft goods can be torn, droids can have energy blasts (I had an idea sketched out to do painted-on energy damage on a figure like what they did with Transformers Universe a few years ago), pilots have all sorts of smudges on the helmets and/or dirty flight suits. There are lots of interesting ways to paint the chest control unit thing to make it look like it got blasted. It's just that battle-damage deco isn't always compelling, especially if clean and dirty versions are sold side-by-side. I don't think people would have been particularly pleased to have had the Republic Elite Forces come out in standard and dirty/damaged versions all at once, for example. But maybe they would-- variety is nice to have.

I'd loooooove to see some battle-damaged astromech and protocol droids some day...

So can we expect some sneak-peek images of this set as we creep towards SDCC Adam? That's what we had last year with the Mandalorians.

From the sounds of it, showing one of them will pretty much give up who the rest are in the set. That makes me strongly believe these are pilots of some sort.

Someone mentioned Rogue Squadron. That would be cool. Make those that have not been done before. or make Hoth pilots when only the X-wing pilot uniform of a character has been made before and vice versa.

I think it would be nice to see actual MOVIE characters made instead of the EU pilots we are already getting in the EVO set. (Though I wouldn't mind Wraith squadron.)

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Anything can be battle-damaged. A figure's armor can be redecorated quite easily, soft goods can be torn, droids can have energy blasts (I had an idea sketched out to do painted-on energy damage on a figure like what they did with Transformers Universe a few years ago), pilots have all sorts of smudges on the helmets and/or dirty flight suits.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at! You mentioned in an earlier post that "battle damage wouldn't have been too exciting" for this set, so I was speculating about which characters wouldn't be in this set based on that criterion. Troopers usually look better with battle damage, as do droids. So I was saying that troopers and droids are probably out of the line-up for this set. Pilots maybe, since like you suggested, can have some battle damage.